The author Prof. Kancha Illayiah was born in a small South Indian Telangana Village in the early fifties.

                In addition to teaching political science at Osmania University, Hyderabad, the author has been working to build up Dalitbahujan and civil liberties movements in Andhra Pradesh. He is also a member of the Satyashodhak research team.

                Having completed his Ph.D. on ‘Gautama Buddha’s Political Philosophy’ he went on to write State and Repressive Culture: The Andhra Experience  (1989) which made a significant contribution towards evolving a perspective on caste and civil liberties. He has contributed theoretical articles to Economic and Political Weekly, Frontier  and Mainstream.  His paper, ‘Experience as Framework of Debate’ which appeared in Economic and Political Weekly,  set up new terms for the debate on the reservation policy.

                He is a founder member of the first Dalitbahujan journal, Nalupu. His booklet, ‘Democratic Revolution in Uttar Pradesh’ (1994), puts electoral politics in a new perspective. He is at present a fellow of Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi.

                He has analysed the socio-economic and cultural differences between dalitbahujans and the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas and the Baniyas and set them in the context of the different stages of lives-childhood, family life market relations, power relations, the Gods and Goddesses, death and so on.

Introduction

            I  was born in a small South Indian Telangana village in the early fifties and grew up the sixties. Our villages had undergone all the turbulence of the freedom movement as they were part of the historical struggle known as the Telangana Armed Struggle. Perhaps as part of the first generation that was born and brought up in post-colonial India, an account of my childhood experiences would also be a narrative of the cultural contradictions that we are undergoing. Village India has not changed radically from my childhood days to the present. If there are any changes, the changes are marginal. Urban India is only an extension of village India. There is a cultural continuum between village India and urban India.

                Suddenly, since about 1990 the word ‘Hindutva’ has begun to echo in our ears, day in and day out, as if everyone in India who is not a Muslim, a Christian or a Sikh is a Hindu. Suddenly I am being told that I am a Hindu. I am also told that my parents, relatives and the caste in which we were born and brought up are Hindu. This totally baffles me. In fact, the whole cultural milieu of the urban middle class—the news papers that I read, the T.V.  that I see—keeps assaulting me, morning and evening, forcing me to declare that I am a Hindu. Otherwise I am socially castigated and my environment is vitiated. Having been born in a Kurumaa (shepherd caste) family, I do not know how I can relate to the Hindu culture that is being project through all kinds of advertising agencies. The government and the state themselves have become big advertising agencies. Moreover the Sangh Parivar harasses us every day by calling us Hindus. In fact, the very sight of its saffron-tilak culture is harassment to us.

                The question before me now is not whether I must treat Muslims or Christians or Sikhs as enemies, as the Hindutva School wants me to do. The question is what do we, the lower Sudras and Ati-Sudras (whom I also call Dalitbahujans), have to do with Hinduism or with Hindutva itself? I, indeed not only I, but all of us, the Dalitsbahujans of India, have never heard the word ‘Hindu’—not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the name of a religion in our early childhood days. We heard about Turukollu  (Muslims), we heard about Kirastaanapoollu  (Christians), we heard about Baapanollu  (Brahmins) and Koomatoollu  (Baniyas) spoken of as people who were different from us. Among these four categories, the most different were the Baapanoollu and the Koomatoollu. There are at least some aspects of life common to us and the Turukoollu and Kirastaanapoollu. We all eat meat, we all touch each other. With the Turukoollu, we shared several other cultural relations. We both celebrates the Peerila festival. Many Turukoollu came with us to the fields. The only people whom we had no relations, whatsoever, were the Baapanoollu and the Koomatoollu. But today we are suddenly being told that we have a common religious and cultural relationship with the Baapanoollu and the Koomatoollu. This is not merely surprising; it is shocking.

              This book is an outcome of my constant interaction with the Dalitbahujans in the Dalit and civil rights movements, who kept telling me, in a variety of ways, about their culture, economy and politics. What I have done is to put their ideas down in a and politics. What I have done is to put their ideas down in a systematic way. Apart from my personal experiences all the ideas in this book are picked up from illiterate and semi-literate Dalitbahujans and also from a few formally educated Dalitbahujan organic intellectuals.

                On several occasions my upper caste friends—women and men—and have discussed the socioeconomic life processes in their castes and families with me. Such discussions were of immense use in building a critique of their culture and economy from the point of view of Dalitbahujan culture and political economy. I thank all those friends. After I had completed the draft Susie Tharu, Duggirala Vasanta and Manohar Reddy involved themselves fully with it, shaping the book into its final form. In fact they spent so much time on it that it virtually became their adopted child.

                All the members of Satyashodhak contributed by participating in our regular ‘adda debates’ (the place where villagers gather together to discuss village problems is known as adda), sharing my ideas and also criticizing them. Special mention must be made of Dr. S.Simhadri and A.Ramanatham whose critique enriched some chapters. Rama Melkote, Veena Shatruguna, K. Lalita and Paroma Deb of Anveshi read some chapters and made useful suggestions. The suggestions that Lalita offered were of great use in the analysis of Brahmin life-processes, as they have been presented in this book.

                My niece Rama and nephew Krishna Kanth typed the first draft and G.Ramalingam of Osmania University keyed it on the computer. R.Srivatsan came to our aid whenever computer technology created knots. In the process Srivatsan, who is a scholar himself, read the manuscript, gave me much-needed encouragement, and offered his valuable comments. My sister-in-law, K.Bharati, brother Kattiah and two younger nephews K.naresh and M.Surender helped in several ways while I was writing this book. I thank all of them.

           I would like to say a word about the terms and concepts that I use in this book. I have not used terms like ‘lower castes’ or ‘Harijans’ while referring to the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs) because the very usage of such terms subordinates the productive castes. Dalitbahujan history has evolved several concepts and terms to refer to the castes that constitute SCs and OBCs.

                Mahatma Jyotiro Phule, who perhaps was the first modern thinker to write about all productive castes, had characterized them as ‘Sudras and Anti Sudras’. There are problems in using the same concepts now. At that time there was no clear division between ‘Sudra upper castes’ (whom I characterize as Neo-Kshatriyas in this book) and the OBCs in general. All those castes that did not fall under the category of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisyas were called ‘Sudras’ and all the so-called untouchables were called ‘Anti-Sudras’. The kind of conceptualization hs its own problems. The concept ‘Sudra’ has been used by brahminical writers in a derogatory sense. It does not communicate a feeling of self-respect and political assertion. Phule’s usage, however, is to be preferred to the abusive brahminical terms like Chandala, mleccha, raaksa,  and so on; even an anglicized term like ‘untouchable’ is equally unacceptable.

                Many sociologists used the term ‘caste Hindus’ to refer to all castes which are outside the Scheduled Castes. This terminology is a trap for the OBCs. In their day-to-day lives the OBCs are as oppressed as are the Scheduled Castes by the ‘upper’ castes. Yet the term offers the OBCs inclusion in the ‘Hindu’ fold—but only as unequals. I, therefore, reject this terminology outright.

                when Ambedkar began to write about these castes, the British Government of India was using the term ‘Depressed Castes’ to denote all working castes. For a long time, Ambedkar used the same concept to denote all productive castes. After the colonial government set up a schedule in which reservations were to be provided for the ‘untouchable’ castes, Ambedkar used the term ‘Scheduled Castes’—of course, to refer only to the so-called untouchable castes. However, he never developed a similar secular term that could refer to the OBC castes collectively.

                Ambedkar gradually shifted to using ‘Dalit’, a concept that is rooted in the Marathi language, to refer to Scheduled Castes. The word ‘Dalit’ means ‘suppressed and exploited people’. The concept seems to have emerged from the people’s usage in Maharashtra. The term ‘Dalit’ became really popular only after the emergence of the ‘Dalit Panthers’ movement in Maharashtra in the 1970s. ‘Dalit’ as it is usually understood encompasses only the so-called untouchable castes. Though recently some organizations like the Dalit Maha Sabha of Andhra Pradesh did attempt to use the word ‘Dalit’ to denote SCs, STs (Scheduled Tribes) and OBCs, the popular press and the masses themselves never took up the usage.

                Meanwhile from 1984 onwards the concept of ‘Bahujan’ began to become popular with the emergence of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Kanshi Ram, the national president of the BSP, began to use the term’Bahujans’, to refer to SCs, STs and OBCs. He also expressed the view that one should not use the term ‘Dalit’ as it separates SCs from STs and OBCs. The concept ‘Bahujan’ simply means ‘majority’. It is in this sense that the term was first used by Buddha and then by Phule. The problem is that it does not point to what the nature of that majority population is. To resolve the problem, I have decided to use the term ‘Dalitbahujans’ to refer to SCs and OBCs. One may also, as Kanshi Ram does, include the STs in it. But I have not discussed STs in this book as strictly speaking they do not figure in the caste system.

                The concept ‘Dalitbahujan’ as I have used it in this book means ‘people and castes who form the exploited and suppressed majority’. I am aware that there are contradictions among the many castes that are referred to by this term. At the same time, I am also aware that there are cultural and economic commonalities as well as commonalities of productive knowledge which mesh them together like threads in a cloth.

                I hope, therefore, that in a struggle to liberate themselves from caste and class exploitation and oppression, the Dalitbahujans turn to the base of the material culture to emerge as a united force. Over a period of time the brahminical castes will become casteless and classless and then we will establish an egalitarian India. In the subtitle of the book, however, I have retained the word ‘Sudra’ so that the readers can easily understand where the critique has come from.

            It is for this reason that I thought I should examine the socio-economic and cultural differences between us and the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas and the Baniyas. The socio-cultural differences would be better understood if we set them in the context of the different stages of our lives—childhood, family life, market relations, power relations, the Gods and Goddesses that we respect, death, and so on. Narratives of personal experiences are the best contexts in which to compare and contrast these social forms. Personal experience brings out reality in a striking way. This method of examining socio-cultural and economic history is central to the social sciences; significantly, the method of narrating and deconstructing experiences has been used by feminists. Further, Indian Dalitbahujan thinkers like Mahatma Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar Ramaswamy Naicker have also used this method. Instead of depending on Western methods, Phule, Ambedkar and Periyar spoke and wrote on the day-day experiences of the Dalitbahujan castes. I would argue that this is the only possible and indeed the most authentic way in which the deconstruction and reconstruction of history can take place.

                Certainly there are problems in contrasting our own experiences, with the experiences of the ‘others’-the Brahmins and the Baniyas. This becomes more problematic in a society like ours in which the Dalitbahujan castes and the Hindu castes (Brahmins, Baniyas, Kshatriyas and neo-Kshatriyas) may live in one village, but the Hindu ‘upper’ caste culture is completely closed to the Dalitbahujan castes. In this respect I am exceptionally fortunate because after I joined Osmania University I made many friends—particularly feminists—who came from Brahmin families. I had long discussions with many of them. My association with the Dalit and civil rights movements helped me understand both the cultures in some depth. I have, therefore, tried to analyse, critique and problematize many popular notions in this small book. Let me make it clear, however, that I am not writing this book to convince suspicious Brahmincal minds; I am writing this book for all those who have open minds. My request to Brahmin, Baniya and Neo-Kshatriya intellectuals is this: For about three thousand years you people learnt only how to teach and what to teach others—the Dalitbahujans. Now in your own interest and in the interest of this great country you must learn to listen and to read what we have to say. A people who refuse to listen to new questions and learn new answers will perish and not prosper.